Opinion| It has been reported that the United Nations is currently in a deficit of $230 million. The news was revealed by Secretary General Antonio Guterres this past Monday. He explained that the UN might be totally out of money be the end of this month. The only thing that will turn this around is if all world governments come up with their financial obligations ASAP.
According to Breitbart News, “U.S. taxpayers would most likely be hardest hit by any immediate cash injection into the global organization. The United States is by far the U.N.’s biggest financial contributor, providing 22 percent of its operating budget and funding 28 percent of peacekeeping missions, which currently cost $8 billion annually. The next two major contributors are Germany and the U.K.”
A letter written to the 37,000 United Nations employees stated that they would have to take “additional stop-gap measures” to make sure that they meet salaries and entitlements.
This may mean that the UN will hold less meetings and limit traveling and other associated entitlements.
“Member States have paid only 70 per cent of the total amount needed for our regular budget operations in 2019. This translates into a cash shortage of $230 million at the end of September. We run the risk of depleting our backup liquidity reserves by the end of the month,” Guterres wrote.
President Trump has been trying to reform the UN for a while. It was just last week that he stated that the “future does not belong to globalists” when issuing a warning to the leaders of the organization.
Breitbart News explains:
In December 2017 Nikki Haley, the then United States Ambassador to the organization, announced the federal government had reduced its contribution to the U.N.’s annual budget by $285 million, as Breitbart News reported.
Haley’s statement came after the U.N. voted to condemn the United States for President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The resolution, backed by nations with long records of extreme human rights abuses, passed 128-9. Haley immediately responded by threatening to reduce America’s U.N. funding.
“The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation,” Haley said in front of the New York City assembly.
She continued, “We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”
According to Newsweek, the Council for Foreign Relations reports that the United States “contributed over $10 billion to the UN in 2017. That accounts for approximately one-fifth of the UN’s budget. Agencies that received the greatest amount of money were the World Food Program, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The U.S. is responsible for 22 percent of the budget, which this year equals more than $3.3 billion. That means the U.S. owes $674 million for the 2019 budget alone. It still owes around $381 million for past budgets.”
